•Police
Need a New Professionalism (Fortunately, It’s Already Hiding Inside Many
Agencies)
•In
cities across the United States, violent crime rates are at record lows as are
the numbers of civilians killed by police action. Yet police agencies are
facing a spike in hostile protests over stop-and-frisk tactics and racial
profiling. In South Africa, crime rates have been falling for years and the
technical sophistication of the Police Service has never been higher, yet
public respect for the police is in the toilet. In Turkey, police corruption,
once flagrant, is now rare, and the use of physical force has virtually
disappeared from interrogations; yet fear of the police is growing. In Rio de
Janeiro, a widely praised police unit that occupies the slums once controlled
by violent gangs has made many of them safer than they have been in a generation,
but the results of a survey of officers working in those slums released this
week reveals that the residents are growing increasingly hostile toward the
police there. Why?
•Why—when
crime is falling, corruption receding, technical mastery growing, torture
disappearing, and safety rising—are the residents of all these places
distrustful of, or outright angry at, the police?
•Police
are still chasing a false image of their own professionalism, conceived a half
century ago. The professionalism of the 1950s and 1960s, made popular in
American television shows like Dragnet,Starsky and Hutch, and S.W.A.T. held out a
promise that following the law, mastering sophisticated weaponry, and pledging
loyalty to the organization would bring professional discipline and, with it,
public respect. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
•By
the 1990s, political leaders and reform-minded police executives had recognized
the problem. The so-called “professional model” of policing was distancing
police from citizens and squelching their ingenuity. In the competition for the
most rapid
response, police departments
lost sight of the right response to a call for help.
•Community
policing—collaborative partnerships between law enforcement and the individuals
and groups they serve—became the new creed: professional policing out,
community policing in. Bill Clinton built a big part of his 1992 presidential
campaign around his pledge to add a hundred thousand community police officers
nationwide, and the African National Congress enshrined community policing in
the 1996 constitution of the new South Africa.
•But
community policing was no match for the allure of professionalism. Community
policing became a specialized unit, a vague philosophy, and a funding stream
from Washington or London, but most of what police agencies around the world
did everyday still looked a lot like the old, professional model. The real
investments were made in new computers, vehicles of every sort, weapons, and
surveillance. Yes, police almost everywhere became more adept at following the
law, and most made gestures toward community policing. These were
meaningful—but not sufficient—achievements.
•Only
a new professionalism can replace the old professionalism. Community policing
is an invaluable foundation for a new professionalism, but it is not—and never
was—a complete package, able to guide detectives as well as patrol officers,
and able to inspire police dealing with financial fraud, gun running, or
political corruption.
•What
is that new professionalism? In an article last year
Jeremy Travis and I suggested that police professionalism requires four
commitments: to accountability, to legitimacy, to innovation, and to national
and global coherence. Professional police are accountable for the cost of
policing, the level of crime, and the conduct of the police themselves.
Professional police attend not just to the legality of their actions, but to
the public perception of those actions as legitimate. Professional police
cultivate innovation and learning throughout their agencies. Professional
policing is nurtured coherently in national, regional, and global networks.
Building that new professional culture of policing will take time and effort,
and it will also take money.
•Last
year, my predecessor at Open Society, Aryeh Neier, began an effort to
create a new, global program on police reform to support more professional,
rights-respecting policing. I encouraged that effort as a member of two Open
Society advisory boards, and now we are bringing those plans to fruition. Of
course, the Open Society Foundations will continue to support human rights
advocates documenting misconduct and pressing for reform and our efforts to
expand the information about crime and policing available from governments and
in media of all kind will continue. But we will also increase support to NGOs,
academics, and police organizations themselves willing to define a new
professionalism in practice.
•The
answers are already in the police agencies. I’ve seen them in the genius of
police officers I’ve worked with in Brazil, Jamaica, the Netherlands, Nigeria,
South Africa, Turkey, and the United States. The answers are also in society,
in organizations like Nigeria’s CLEEN Foundation and the Brazilian Forum for
Public Security, whose conference I attended this week. Most promising of all,
the answers lie in partnerships between police agencies aspiring to a new
professionalism and the people they police.
•There
will always be a certain degree of force in policing. What matters is whether
policing—when it asserts its authority—makes democratic progress possible or
impedes it. Professional policing enhances democratic progress when it accounts
for what it does, achieves public support, learns through innovation, and
transcends parochialism.
•Learn
More:
PG. 19
The
Events
•The Open Society Foundations early childhood programs
advance a holistic approach to teaching, while our advocacy and debate
initiatives strive to ensure that young people of different backgrounds have
equal access to education and individual expression.
•FEATURED
WORK
•REPORT
•VOICES
•Instead of investing millions of dollars to build a new
jail, state officials should end the practice of automatically charging youth
as adults.
•VOICES
•Obama's new Initiative on Educational Excellence for
African Americans is a significant game changer for millions of black students.
•OPEN SOCIETY
VOICES
•September 18, 2012 by Monique DixonInstead of investing
millions of dollars to build a new jail, state officials should end the
practice of automatically charging youth as adults.
•September 18, 2012 by Andrea Csanadi 1
•A DVD collection of Central Asian cinema looks at Soviet
and post-Soviet cinema in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and
Uzbekistan.
•September 17, 2012 by Katherine LaphamWhy providing access to
high-quality education is a good place to try to right the wrongs of twenty
years of turmoil in the South Caucasus.
•NEWS
•GRANTEE
SPOTLIGHT
•VOICES
•EXPERTS
•Senior Advisor, Pakistan / Lead Education Economist and
Researcher, South Asia
•Education Support Program
•Director, Education and Youth Development Program
•Open Society Institute–Baltimore
•Campaign Manager, Campaign for Black Male Achievement
•U.S. Programs
•UPCOMING
EVENTS
•OCT 12
•This conference is designed to bring together a range of
institutions and representatives to critically debate the effects of
privatization on education quality, equity, effectiveness, and efficiency.
pg. 20
THE
PROFESSIONALS
Jane Sundius is the Education and
Youth Development Program director at the Open Society Institute–Baltimore. She
is responsible for the development and implementation of a grantmaking, advocacy, and
technical assistance program that works to enhance access to high quality
learning opportunities for all of Baltimore’s youth, both in and out of
school.
Recent major initiatives include efforts to increase the quality and quantity of
after-school and summer learning opportunities for Baltimore’s children, to
reduce suspensions, expulsions, and arrests in public schools and to improve
student attendance. She serves on several advisory groups working to improve
outcomes for children, including the executive committee of the Baltimore
Education Research Consortium and the advisory committee of the Maryland
Out-of-School-Time Network.
Prior to her work at the Open Society Foundations, she worked as a research and
evaluation consultant to local foundations and nonprofit organizations and was the administrator of a graduate
program in public policy. She also served as a senior research associate on a
longitudinal study of Baltimore City Public School children that analyzed the
effects of poverty and family characteristics on school performance and tracked
children’s school year and summer learning trajectories. She holds a PhD in
sociology and an MA in public policy from the Johns Hopkins
University.
pg 21
Faisal
Bari is senior advisor for Pakistan with the Central Eurasia Project and lead
education economist and researcher for South Asia for the Education Support
Program. He is also associate professor of economics at Lahore University of
Management Sciences.
Bari has been a teacher and researcher in the field of development and
education in Pakistan for over 12 years.
Pg 22
THE
MAN BEHIND
FOUNDER/CHAIRMAN
GEORGE SOROS
PG. 23
THE
PRESIDENT of OSF
Christopher Stone is
the president of the Open Society Foundations. He is an international expert on
criminal justice reform and on the leadership and governance of nonprofits.
Prior to joining Open
Society as president in July 2012, he was the
Guggenheim Professor of the
Practice of Criminal Justice at Harvard
University’s John F. Kennedy School of
Government and director of the
Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. Before that, Stone spent a
decade as
director of the Vera Institute of Justice. He founded the
Neighborhood Defender Service of
Harlem and served as a founding
director of the New York State Capital Defender
Office and of the Altus Global Alliance.
Stone received his BA
from Harvard, an MPhil in criminology from the
University of Cambridge, and his
JD from Yale Law School. He was awarded
an honorary Order of the British Empire
for his contributions to criminal justice reform in the United Kingdom.
PG. 24
pg. 25
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